Constitutional Design and Political Communication

Dimitrios Xefteris

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper models the constitutional design process, and points out the importance of political communication (defined as the level of information about the social distribution of policy preferences that individuals hold, at the time of this process) on the "extent" of "democratic restraints" of the socially preferred constitution and on the welfare derived by the society from its implementation. The results demonstrate that the level of political communication has a positive effect on the level of democracy of the socially preferred constitution and on social welfare. Moreover, it is proved that, even if there exist no tolerance for dictatorship by societies in general, the level of democracy demanded by the society, reaches the maximum possible level, only if political communication is "perfect". That is, the socially preferred constitution in cases of "imperfect" political communication incorporates both dictatorial and democratic elements.

Keywords: constitution; political communication; democracy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D60 D70 D81 K00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-06-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/18490/1/MPRA_paper_18490.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:18490

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().